Re: "Have" as perfective auxilliary in various languages


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Feb 25, 8:47 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But note that Greek, Albanian, and Macedonian also use "have" for
perfect, though they still have a separate past (aorist and/or
imperfect). To quote Wikipedia ("Balkan Linguistic Union"):

So wikipedia doesn't even know that the English term is "linguistic
area," but instead has calqued "Sprachbund."

As one would expect, WP has entries for all three ("Balkan linguistic area", "Balkan sprachbund", "Balkan linguistic union"). Of course, they all redirect automatically to the same place. For whatever reason, when I looked up "Albanian language", the writer suggested I click through to "Balkan linguistic union" to find more, which I did, and did. So it seems that the person who wrote that article on Albanian (which didn't tell me what I wanted to know anyway -- see my previous post) was indeed ignorant of the point you're making.

Still, it's a bit rough blaming "wikipedia" (whoever she is) for the choice of nomenclature made by just one of wikipedia's thousands of contributors.

Just for fun, number of ghits:

"balkan sprachbund": 11700
"balkan linguistic area": 37 (!!!)
"balkan linguistic union": 10900
"sprachbund": 49500
"linguistic area": 63000
"linguistic union": 12700

The last two are of course likely to be inflated by non-relevant entries.

However, it's clear that the calque "linguistic union" is the overwhelming English-language preference for people talking about the Balkans on the web.

OTOH, it's equally clear that "linguistic area" is the overwhelmingly preferred translation for sprachbunds everywhere else in the world. The first few hits refer to the Mesoamerican linguistic area, the Australian linguistic area, the Indian linguistic area, the European linguistic area, the Daly River linguistic area, the African linguistic area, the NW Californian linguistic area, ... There are just two cases of the use of "linguistic area" in a page on Balkan languages in the first hundred hits -- and they're down around number 90.

[Standard disclaimer: No, of course I don't really believe in googlestats.]

John.

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